Foreword - Santayana famously said, "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it". Perhaps it's time we started reminding each other about the process that led to the setting up of Creative Scotland. This timeline attempts to do that and to pull together in one place the consultations and reports that have been compiled so far.The information here has been drawn from personal notes, gleaned online, and owes a particular debt to the online archives of Variant and the timeline at creativescotland.blogspot.co.uk. If you notice omissions or facts that are incorrect, please post them in the comments section.

Afterword - All the success stories I've ever been part of or have come across, whether in business and in the arts, in Scotland, England, Europe or overseas, have originated in individuals with a vision, a vision they cared passionately about and had the courage, conviction, and dedication to make real. This is so fundamental an aspect of what it is to be an artist or what is usually called an entrepreneur that we usually assume everyone understands it.Now we've had nearly fourteen years of consultations and conferences and seminars and summits and workgroups in which the people Scotland have talked about Creative Scotland, before and after the organisation came into being. Re-reading the 1999 survey, it's striking how many of the responses are as true today as they were then. There must be rooms full of paperwork and servers full of data. Millions of pounds have been spent on the processes that led to Creative Scotland, money which surely could have been better spent on encouraging people in Scotland to be creative. During the decade that it took to bring Creative Scotland into existence, banks failed, credit crunched, property bubbles burst and whole countries went bankrupt but the idea that market-oriented management* of the public sector was the best way of moving forward went seemingly unquestioned by the organisation's midwives. And finally, here is the Scottish Government's Gateway to Scotland website. The Visit Scotland page links to VisitScotland's website. The Creative Scotland tab does not mention the eponymous agency. First noticed in 2010, the assumption was that once CS' permanent website was in place, it would be linked but so far this does not seem to be the case.

*See Managerialism "In Managerialism, there is a belief that organizations have more similarities than differences, and thus the performance of all organizations can be optimized by the application of generic management skills and theory. To a practitioner of Managerialism, there is little difference in the skills required to run a college, an advertising agency or an oil rig. Experience and skills pertinent to an organization's core business are considered secondary".

Creative Scotland

Creative Scotland is the merger and expanded remit of the public bodies, the Scottish Arts Council and Scottish Screen. It remains a confusing and self-contradictory set of proposals overwhelmingly seeking to makes artists instruments of government policy – in the words of the bill, artists are to “support the government’s overarching purpose.”